BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Lean Content on InfoQ

  • Q&A with Nadja Macht on Innovation, Flow and Continuous Improvement

    Retrospectives help teams to learn from their experiences and improve continuously. In this interview Nadja Macht, Flow Manager and Coach at Jimdo, talks about how to balance flow and slack time in teams, doing visual management with Kanban boards and deploying agile retrospectives for continuous improvement.

  • Seven Changes to Remove Waste From Your Software Development Process

    This is a story about implementing Lean Software Development in a software vendor house for about 2 years, during which seven major changes have gradually been implemented that have helped the R&D department to remove waste from their software development process with encouraging results.

  • Book Review and Q&A of Strength-based Lean Six Sigma

    The book Strength-based Lean Six Sigma: Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement by David Shaked supports applying strength-based change approaches with lean thinking and Six Sigma. InfoQ interviewed David about applying strength-based techniques like appreciative inquiry, solution focused, positive deviance and 5-why's with Lean Six Sigma, and measuring performance in organizations.

  • Exchanging Industry Experiences with Agile Methodologies

    The Agile Consortium Belgium, Sirris and Agoria organized an event to share experiences with agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, visual management, XP, DSDM and Lean. An interview about the different agile methodologies that were covered, on using agile for innovation and how events where organizations share their experiences can help the industry to adopt agile practices.

  • Kanban on Track - Evolutionary Change Management at the Swiss Railways

    Swiss Railways (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, SBB) employed Kanban to transform a department from disappointing performance to predictable efficiency through a series of incremental improvements. The evolutionary nature of Kanban gained traction with early quick wins and resulted in better management and greater responsiveness to change. This is a brief report of their two year journey.

  • Culture is the True North - Scaling at Jimdo

    A lot of the pain that large and medium-sized organizations are facing boils down to scaling. It is not difficult to have 5-10 people working together in one room. However, as your business becomes more successful and your hiring increases, you will start to see problems. At Jimdo, the approach to scaling relies on three major factors: culture, communication, and kaizen.

  • Bug Fixing Vs. Problem Solving - From Agile to Lean

    Lean has proved to be instrumental in moving beyond Agile to set up a practice of continuous improvement with direct effects on team performance and engagement. Making a clear distinction between bugs and problems has proved to be instrumental in this improvement.

  • Interview with Tobias Mayer about the People’s Scrum and AgileLib

    The people’s Scrum by Tobias Mayer is a collection of essays covering topics like self-organizing, team working, craftsmanship, technical debt, estimation, retrospectives, culture and Scrum adoption. InfoQ interviewed Tobias about the importance of people, teams and self organization with Scrum and about AgileLib.net, a new initiative for sharing agile resources.

  • 3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT: Sustaining Kanban in the Enterprise

    This second article in the “3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT” series focuses on the lessons that the System Development Office learned when sustaining the Kanban method during this 4 years journey. Presented are four qualities that Sandvik IT identified as key when setting-up relevant, and long-term, kanban systems in the enterprise: Stickiness, Clarity, Curiosity and Influence.

  • Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story

    This article shows an internally driven and remarkably smooth Kanban implementation approach which very quickly rewarded Siemens Health Services (HS) with real and sustainable improvements in predictability, efficiency and quality. It demonstrates the benefits of “flow” and its advantages in terms of actionable metrics and forecasting capabilities based on real data captured from recent releases.

  • The Kanban Survivability Agenda

    This third and last article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the survivability agenda. The values associated with this agenda are understanding, agreement, and respect; these say much about the philosophy that underlies Kanban, the humane, start with what you do now approach to change.

  • Author Q&A – The Lean Mindset by Tom and Mary Poppendieck

    The Lean Mindset is a collection of research results and case studies from companies applying lean in product development and delivery. A lean mindset according to Mary and Tom Poppendieck is about “developing the expertise to ask the right questions, solve the right problems, and do the right thing in the situation at hand”.

BT